About “A Certain Scientific Railgun” in a few words:

A Certain Scientific Railgun is a Japanese anime series based on the manga of the same name. It is a spin-off of the popular anime, A Certain Magical Index, and is set in Academy City, a technologically advanced city populated by people with superhuman abilities. The story follows the adventures of Mikoto Misaka, a powerful electromaster, and her friends as they investigate and confront various threats to the city.

Meet the characters from A Certain Scientific Railgun

Mikoto Misaka

Mikoto Misaka is the electric heart of Academy City — basically a walking lightning bolt and an absolute force of nature. She’s a Level 5 Electromaster with a short fuse, quick to zap anyone who annoys her (or anyone who sort of vaguely looks at her sandwiches), but also stubbornly refuses help even when she’s totally outmatched. Under the bangs and the bratty attitude there’s this surprisingly soft, protective person who gets flustered over tiny things and has weird guilty pleasures (cute plushies? grilled cheese? possibly all of them). Her tsundere energy is peak entertainment — one moment she’s smirking and throwing coins around like some physics demo, the next she’s blushing and denying everything — and honestly that contradiction is why she’s so lovable.

Kuroko Shirai

Kuroko Shirai is the hyperactive teleporting mess who lives to enforce “justice” and also to annoy Mikoto at every possible second. She can warp around and rearrange your furniture (or your life) in an instant, which she uses both for arrests and for extremely dramatic hallway entrances. Kuroko is obsessive, theatrical, and fiercely loyal to a ridiculous degree — she’ll recite rules with a sparkle in her eye and then push someone off a roof for bad manners. She oscillates between being painfully clingy and deadly serious on the job, and she has a ridiculous fondness for accessories and snacks that she will absolutely dramatize in conversation.

Ruiko Saten

Ruiko Saten is the cheerful, curious Level 0 who brings the everyday human perspective to a city full of superpowers and weird scientific experiments. She’s warm, a little nosy (in the best way), and always ready to gossip about the latest odd job or new rumor — with cookies in hand, probably. Ruiko worries a lot but also surprises people by being braver than she lets on; she’ll squeal about something cute and then somehow lead you out of a sketchy alley ten minutes later. Those small contradictions — clutching a lucky charm while sneaking into places she perhaps shouldn’t — make her oddly heroic and totally relatable.

Uiharu Kazari

Uiharu Kazari is the soft-spoken research ninja with the cutest flower hair clips and an alarming amount of hidden competence. She’s the person who does the digging, the data-cleanup, and the panic-avoiding for Judgment, but she’s not a cold technician — she’s nervy, kind, and way more emotionally invested than she pretends to be. Uiharu can be forgetful about mundane things (keys? lunches? socks?) yet she’s meticulous with tech and obsessive about protecting her friends, and yes, she has a suspiciously large plushie/sweets stash. She looks fragile but is secretly the glue that holds a lot of chaos together, which is kind of her whole vibe.

Touma Kamijou

Touma Kamijou is the gloriously unlucky, stubbornly heroic guy who gets smacked down by fate every other episode and still grins through the concussion. His right hand, the Imagine Breaker, nullifies supernatural powers, which is the universe’s idea of “plot armor” and also an ongoing source of headaches and bruises. He’s loud, messy, annoyingly selfless, and somehow both painfully dense about romance and unnervingly perceptive about people’s pain — he’ll miss a joke but notice your scar. Touma lives off instant curry and righteous willpower, jumps into fights he shouldn’t win, and somehow makes friend-of-the-week into deeply important. He hates authorities (for reasons) and is the worst person to drag into bureaucracy but the best person to have when everything is collapsing.

Accelerator

Accelerator is the terrifyingly overpowered Level 5 who starts as a cold, chaotic force and somehow turns into the grumpiest protective dad in the city. He controls vectors, so physics obeys his mood swings — watching him fight is like watching the rules of reality get aggressively rewritten. At first he’s ruthless and frightening, but then a tiny, soft influence (you know who) pulls out this absurd, reluctant tenderness that clashes wildly with his violent past. He hates being touched and also will go to extreme and awkward lengths to protect those he cares about, has weird snack habits (I swear he eats ice cream like a secret ritual), and uses sarcasm like armor. There’s something unbearably human under the white hair and scowls — he’ll scowl you into a coma and then quietly fix what he broke, which breaks you in the best way.